BOSTON — Only 6% of Americans believe that artificial intelligence will mostly strengthen democracy, a study on AI in civic life by the community organizing nonprofit Murmuration found.
Still, the study found areas of optimism. Fifty-six percent of respondents identified AI helping people learn new things as a benefit, and 54% said it can expand access to knowledge.
To address these findings, and more, Murmuration hosted an event on Sept. 30 in Boston, bringing together community members across various fields, including nonprofits, academia, and art.
"Democracy is a system of faith. It only works if people believe that by participating, they will have impact," Murmuration's founder and CEO Emma Bloomberg said at the event.
Speakers included Harvard
political philosopher Danielle Allen, USA TODAY Washington bureau chief Susan Page, Civics Unplugged director Abby Binder, and Murmuration chief research officer Sarah Stamper. The event was hosted in collaboration with USA TODAY.
"We’re in Boston because it's such an interesting location for the intersection of technology and innovation and AI, but also with such a deep societal and cultural importance to America and its founding," Stamper told USA TODAY before the event.
The questions guiding the night, posed by Bloomberg, were "How can AI really help to elevate humanity?" and thus, "What does it mean to be human?"
Divides between groups on AI
The survey gathered responses from 7,188 adults in the United States from July 14 to 26. Among respondents, some of the biggest tensions were seen between young men and young women.
Women between 18 and 30 showed the highest level of concern about the societal impact of AI, with 58% saying AI is having a negative impact on the world. That's compared with 38% of men in the same age group who say the same.
In her speech, Binder emphasized the need for all young people to "build discernment" around AI, which can require changing the lens through which it's talked about.
"We’re talking about AI as if it’s a technological conversation a lot of the time, but it’s also a cultural conversation," she said.
More common ground was found among survey respondents on community issues. For example, 86% said that residents of local towns should have input when a data center is proposed in their community.
Stamper highlighted the importance of surveys in demonstrating shared beliefs like this one.
"It can help to show that you have people in the fight with you," she said.
Among the concerns highlighted in the data, fear of misinformation and fake content ranked highest, with 35% of respondents citing it as a top concern.
"Our democracy will not work if we don't have legitimate and broadly accepted sources of information. And that is one of the big tasks that face us with the impact of AI," Page told USA TODAY.
AI in democracy
Page's speech focused on the changes she's witnessed in journalism since she first started reporting in 1980, quipping that "in those days, the White House Press Corps wrote our stories on portable typewriters, and then we filed them by teletype. It's like saying we were mailing letters by the Pony Express."
Just as AI can be bad for the information ecosystem, Page expressed hope that it could be used to fix it too.
"Can the problem be the solution, and do we really have a choice?" she asked.
Women, lower-income, rural and non-college-educated people expressed higher levels of concern. Sixty-two percent of rural Americans, for example, said local residents should have the most say over where data centers are built, compared with 47% of urban Americans.
The same groups were more likely to say they did not use AI, and tended to prioritize human creativity. Sixty-five percent of respondents earning at least $100,000 said AI can save time and increase efficiency, compared to 46% who earn less than $50,000.
Despite divides among groups, Republicans and Democrats expressed similar skepticism about AI-generated recommendations on local services or government spending. Forty-five percent of Democrats and 41% of Republicans expressed such skepticism.
"We heard in the data that people want human judgment, human connection, human decision-making, a.k.a., healthy democracy," Allen said during her speech on Sept. 30. "So they're expressing precisely the lack of the governing capacity that we need to tackle a huge, big problem of what we're going to do about AI."
She emphasized the need to address the problem on both the cultural and institutional fronts, not just at the federal level but across every municipal jurisdiction and territory in the United States.
"We have to renovate all of that," she said.
The local conversation struck a chord with survey respondents, too. When asked to prioritize global competitiveness in AI or community and environmental considerations, respondents favored the latter by more than three-to-one, 55% to 17%
"We are seeing far more common ground around what people want for their lives, which is really agency and opportunity," Stamper said.
Greta Reich covers the artificial intelligence industry for USA TODAY through a fellowship from the Tarbell Center for AI Journalism. Funders do not provide editorial input.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Can AI strengthen democracy? Only 6% of Americans think so, survey finds
